The Uncubed Studios Guide to Building a Modern Career Page
The career page is one of the most fundamental elements of an employer brand. Every company needs one, whether you’re hiring or not.
There’s no single way to do it right—effective career pages can be big or small, detailed or high-level, but all of the good ones tend to hit specific notes. Here are the juicy bits that make a career page good.
Your career page is more than a list of open jobs!
Your career page must be more than a list of job openings - real job openings and not fake job listings you’ve been forced to put up there because someone high up thinks that’s good employer branding - and it must be more than a link to your Greenhouse page or LinkedIn profile. If this is all you’ve got going on, there’s no faster way to tell job seekers that you don’t invest in the employee experience, even if that’s not true.
Take Canada Pooch, a company that makes the coolest dog coats around. Sadly, this is their entire career page:
The ultra-hip bag company Baggu doesn’t do much better.
You’re thinking, but I’m not even hiring! What do I need a career page for? Having a page dedicated to the employee experience sends a message to current employees, consumers, and future candidates that you put some thought into what it feels like to work at your company.
Consumers care about your employer brand reputation: According to a 2020 Edelman report, 29% of consumers say the way a company treats its employees is the most important factor in deciding whether to become a loyal customer, and 27% say it’s the most important factor in whether they will try a brand for the first time.
And even if your company isn’t hiring now, it might be someday, and you don’t want to be scrambling to set up your employer brand when you need a new account manager yesterday. Plant your little brand seeds now: How to set up your career page when you’re not hiring.
Whatever you do, do it well
Whatever kind of career page experience you build, do it well. Some employers like Nike and Apple build entire sites dedicated to employer branding, and others build a single page. Both can be effective. Whichever style you choose, do it well. There’s no need to go ham on a full career site if you’re going to fill it with fluff.
Effective career sites
The most developed career pages are immersive experiences. Apple’s career microsite, for instance, is laden with video, photo, illustration, and animation. It includes employee profiles, statements about culture and values, and details about its ERGs and priorities like accessibility, the environment, and racial justice. It has subpages and layers, it’s expertly produced, much like Apple’s consumer-facing brand.
Not every company will have the resources to build and manage a full microsite, and that’s fine. Simple career pages can be just as powerful in conveying your employer brand and attracting new talent. The American Heart Association has a single main page that includes short text and video testimonials from employees, videos of the AHA’s offices, and photos of the staff, with subpages about culture, benefits, and the hiring process. It’s pithy and effective.
No cutesy names for your staff
Stop referring to your employees as Googlers, Affirmers, or Cityzens. This is not summer camp. Eventbrite refers to their employees *cringe* as “Britelings.” Don’t be them.
Talking about your “team” is fine.
Make the employee, not the employer, the hero
On Apple’s DEI page, find this brief profile of retail manager and Indigenous@Apple ERG leader Wendy Santos. It reads, in part:
Wendy, a founding member of Indigenous@Apple, cultivates partnerships with Apple services teams that integrate Indigenous culture into their work on Music, Maps, and other products. For Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, she worked with Apple Music to create a radio station featuring local artists capturing the spirit of pa’u hana, a Native Hawaiian tradition of bonding and storytelling after work.
The story is not that Apple empowered Wendy to do great things, but that Wendy’s real experience empowered her to thrive in a culture that appreciates her for what she brings to the table.
Make sure it reflects the reality of working at your company
Your career page should put your company’s best foot forward, but it should also be an accurate representation of what it’s like to be an employee there. Employees will resent a company that refuses to be honest about its culture and environment, and candidates will find out quickly that you’re bending the truth.
Use this to your advantage. Perhaps your environment is warm, casual, and familial, like that of Siete Foods. The company created a video called “Siete Scares” in which the CEO sneaks up and scares his employees one at a time. Their reactions and the informal set up (it’s shot in someone’s living room!) indicate that this is a small, warm place to work. The video isn’t overly polished, and, it seems, neither is their office. It works.
Your employee experience is more than perks and values
It’s great to list your perks and benefits on your career site, but it’s got to be more than that. There’s no need to go into great detail—high-level points are usually enough to get the message across.
Siete Foods does this well.
If you do want to go into detail, avoid overloading the page with text and instead link out from your main career page to a sub page, like Whole Foods does. Visitors can select the “Whole Benefits” tile and find more info on the company’s benefits page.
Remind visitors that your employees are real people who live and breathe and move and stuff
Your career page should make a visual impression. Start off with something eye-catching and on-brand. That might be a great photo, looping video, an animation, or illustration. Whatever it is, make it memorable.
Throughout your page, make a point to remind the visitor that real human beings work there—not models, not stock photo people (you’re not fooling anyone). And avoid the empty office photo—it’s just sad.
Here’s how Eventbrite banners its career page.
Make declarative statements and dump the jargon
Yes, we believe in DEI too. So what are you doing about it? We think it’s great that you want your employees to grow their careers. How do you set them up to do so? Don’t just tell job seekers that you empower your employees to thrive, tell them how you empower employees to thrive.
Check out the way Shopify talks about its employees’ career growth.
If you do want to go into detail, avoid overloading the page with text and instead link out from your main career page to a sub page, like Whole Foods does. Visitors can select the “Whole Benefits” tile and find more info on the company’s benefits page.
Be clear about who will thrive in your company
Avoid the temptation to oversell. A site that insists your company is the best place to work in the whole universe is a red flag. Even great workplaces aren’t right for everyone. Shopify makes it clear the kind of employee they’re looking for.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter based in Richmond, VA, who covers the future of work and women’s experience in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, Quartz at Work, and Digiday’s Worklife.news, among others.
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